Shurpu

Shurpu answers a different question from Maqlu, and the two together show a system of diagnosis at work. Maqlu asks who did this to me. Shurpu asks what have I done. The sufferer in Shurpu is bound by a mamitu, a curse or oath-sanction that has come into force because some obligation was broken, and the crucial feature is that he may not know which one. He is not being attacked. He has stepped on something.

The remedy is therefore comprehensive rather than targeted. The series recites the possible offences at length, so that whichever applies is named and released, and it is that list which has given Shurpu a readership far outside Assyriology. It runs from the plainly religious, contempt for a god, a broken oath, to the plainly social: moving a boundary marker, refusing a beggar, setting a son against a father, dividing a family, saying one thing with the mouth and another in the heart. It is not a law code and it is not a moral treatise. It is a list of the things a Babylonian expected might be silently held against him.

Erica Reiner's 1958 edition remains the standard, and her arrangement of the material is the one the literature cites. Her edition is in copyright, and this atlas describes the contents of the list rather than reproducing her translation of it.

The exorcist who used Shurpu also used Maqlu, and the pairing is what makes each of them intelligible. Both survive in the same libraries, are copied by the same scribal tradition, and belong to the professional repertoire of the ashipu, a trained specialist with a curriculum rather than a folk practitioner. The choice between the two was a working judgement about the cause of an affliction, made on evidence, and the whole apparatus of Mesopotamian divination existed partly to inform such judgements.

That structure resists the usual modern division between magic and religion. The ashipu operated within the temple establishment, was literate in a scholarly tradition, prayed to the great gods and appealed to divine judgement. Nothing in his practice was clandestine, and the witch of Maqlu is condemned precisely because what she does is illegitimate while what he does is not. The distinction being drawn is not between magic and religion but between authorised and unauthorised action.

The atlas holds both series as incantations rather than as rituals for a reason that follows from that. Each is an attested text with manuscript witnesses, a transmission history and a critical edition, and it is the text that survives. The night's performance does not survive, and what can be said about it is inferred from the ritual tablet rather than observed.